Dr. Ullas Karanth

After founding, and nearly 30 years of leading WCS-India, Dr. Karanth stepped down from the Country Director position in 2018, to enable him to focus on what got him into conservation, to begin with: the science of wildlife. During his nearly 30 years leading WCS-India Dr. Karanth has had many achievements including co-authoring scores of seminal scientific papers that hugely advanced the field of tiger and other wildlife population ecology and estimations; helping catalyse the government policy of voluntary resettlement in India that has led to dramatic reductions in threats to wildlife in protected areas in India as well as the improved livelihood opportunities for thousands of families; catalysing the creation of a Master’s Degree Program in Wildlife Conservation and Biology whose 85+ alumni are now stalwarts of conservation and conservation science across India. Perhaps Dr. Karanth’s finest achievement was finding and supporting talented conservationists and conservation scientists who are now the key staff and partners of WCS India Program and who today are transforming conservation in much of India.

Dr. Karanth remains with WCS for a while as he focuses on writing up scientific studies based on the years of data collected on wildlife in India and on representing WCS’s tiger conservation efforts globally.